A year later Lydia H. Sigourney published her poem, "Pocahontas."
Brought out by Harper & Brothers in New York, this ode seems
to be one of the few widely appreciated poems about the Indian
Princess. Many poems and fictional novels were produced in the
19th century; most were written by women, and most were self-published,
presumably for small audiences. The Sigourney poem demonstrates
the sentimentality and Byronic diction typical of these poems,
yet it was probably much more widely read than the others, judging
from the profile of the publisher. In her poem, Mrs. Sigourney
paints the pre-colonial Virginia landscape as another Garden of
Eden:

"Earth seem'd to glow with Eden's purple light, The fleeting
days glanced by on pinion's bright, And every hour a rainbow lustre
lent; While, with his tones of music in her ear, Love's eloquence
inspired the high-born cavalier."

The young cavalier in the last line of that stanza is John
Rolfe, who is cast in this poem as an equally Edenic figure, the
American Adam destined to bridge the mythical past with the colonial
future. In this poem, as in many other19th century Pocahontas
odes, the omniscient narrating voice tells us that Pocahontas
possesses the ideal Christian, feminine demeanor, even before
Englishmen ever set foot on American soil. She is the embodiment
of the noble simplicity of nature. The union of the idealized
European gentleman--- sometimes John Smith, sometimes it is John
Rolfe--- with the noble savage maiden is the most powerful force
behind the Pocahontas mythology. In the marriage of the two, one
may clearly read the preferred metaphor of American settlement:
the sublime wilderness subdued and converted to English purposes
presented as a divine seduction. It serves as a connection to
the pre-Columbian history of this land as well as an antidote
to the unsavory 19th century reality of Indian removal and genocide.

By the mid-1900's Americans in the eastern states must have
begun to feel sufficiently safe from the Indian threat to afford
nostalgia for their lost civilization. Also at work is the interest
in the Native American who seemed to validate the mission of the
colonists: you were and are right, she suggests by her assimilation.
Sigourney's poem, for example, ends this way:

"The council-fires are quench'd, that erst so red Their
midnight volume mid the groves entwined; King, stately chief,
and warrior-host are dead, Nor remnant nor memorial left behind:
But thou, O forest-princess, true of heart, When o'er our fathers
waved destruction's dart, Shalt in their children's loving hearts
be shrined; Pure, lonely star, o'er dark oblivion's wave, It is
not meet thy name should moulder in the grave."

The poem beseeches readers to remember, but the story of Pocahontas
is not a fixed historical truth to recalled, but an illusive,
shifting, and ever-evolving legend. In fact, one might suggest
that this sentimental version of Pocahontas is a uniquely 19th
century invention, a useful icon for the times. When the culture
clearly needed both a mythical, Edenic past as well as a balm
for its guilt over Indian removal under Jackson and others, Americans
turned to Pocahontas. You were and are right, she seemed to say.